Martin Parr: 'If I knew how to take a great photo, I’d stop’

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Martin Parr has turned his unerring eye for the quirks of British life on a new subject. He tells Alastair Sooke what drives him

"I’m a nosy person,” says Martin Parr, examining his deadpan portrait of a Yorkshire farmhand clutching a bundle of rhubarb. “There’s no better way of finding out about something than going to photograph it. And the Rhubarb Triangle has always fascinated me.”

Sitting downstairs in the tall Georgian terraced house in Bristol where he has lived since 1987, Parr, 63, the sardonic chronicler of contemporary life and arguably Britain’s greatest living photographer, is discussing his latest commission, a series of colour pictures documenting the nine square miles of countryside in West Yorkshire known as the Rhubarb Triangle.

Here, in the frostbitten fields on the edge of the Pennines, between Wakefield, Morley and Rothwell, the conditions are peculiarly conducive to the cultivation of this edible Siberian plant. As a result, during the 19th century, a vigorous rhubarb industry emerged.

In its heyday, in the Thirties, there were hundreds of growers in the Triangle, which once encompassed 30 sq miles. Now, though, there are only a dozen left – and Parr spent much of last winter documenting them.

There they all are in his pictures. A stocky man in a flat cap, holding a special L-shaped thermometer that measures the “cold units” of the soil in the fields; a jug-eared lad wielding a pitchfork loaded with tubers; three grubby, wizened workers, Dickensian in their muck-spattered aprons.

Martin Bramley. The Rhubarb Triangle. 2015.Credit:
Martin Parr

Early next month Parr’s rhubarb series will be shown at the Hepworth Wakefield gallery, as part of the first British survey of his career since a retrospective at the Barbican in 2002. “We still have an issue with photography in Britain,” he says in the commanding baritone voice with which he marshals his clipped, decisive sentences. “I sell a lot more prints abroad in, say, Paris than in London. It’s unusual for me to have a big show here.”

Parr is a tall, imposing figure with the faintly awkward bearing of a retired military officer. When I ask him to explain the appeal of the Rhubarb Triangle as a photographic subject, he seems instantly irked. “That’s why I take photographs,” he replies. “Remember: that’s how I express myself. Why should I do it in words when I’m a photographer?”

This is not what I was expecting. If anything, Parr is known for his impish humour. Ever since he showed his great photographic series of the Eighties, which anatomised the subtly odd, and sometimes ludicrous social conventions of the British working and middle classes, he has enjoyed a reputation as a playful satirist, skewering the nation’s eccentricities.

His eye is often drawn to those details that are surprisingly eloquent about status and taste: chintzy toilet roll covers, dark-brown tea in china cups, greasy fry-ups. In short, Parr loves to record the mundane absurdities that make Britain both charming and bizarre. “Part of what I’ve done is to make the everyday look more interesting,” he says. He even devoted his first photo-book, Bad Weather, to our national obsession.

People are funny. There’s no question about that. How can you not laugh?

Martin Parr

Irony, then, is his prime modus operandi as an artist. Yet, when I look into his eyes, I do not see a sparkle. Does he consider himself a satirist? “I understand that there is a background in the UK of satire, and I feel part of that,” he says.

“But it is as much mischief as anything else.”

So he enjoys poking fun at people? “Well, people are funny, there’s no question about that,” he replies. “How can you not laugh at what’s going on in the world? If you don’t have mischief, it turns into PR and propaganda.”

Parr was born in 1952 in Epsom, Surrey, and grew up in “a posh bungalow” in suburbia. After studying photography at Manchester Polytechnic, he moved in 1975 to Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire, where he produced a body of work in black and white chronicling the disappearing customs in the North of England which has become a classic of documentary photography.

There followed a short stint in Ireland, with his wife, Susie, who is now a writer (they have a 29-year-old daughter, Ellen, who is a chef). They returned to England in 1982 and moved to Wallasey, a town on the mouth of the River Mersey.

Around this time, Parr became inspired by “the serious colour photography coming from America”, by the likes of William Eggleston and Joel Sternfeld. He also started to collect “brightly coloured” postcards.

Today he collects photo-books (indeed, his promotion of them has helped to spark serious interest in the genre), as well as strange ephemera, including watches decorated with the face of Saddam Hussein, and Margaret Thatcher memorabilia.

“Clutter?” he says, with self-conscious irony, when he shows me his boxes of bric-a-brac in the basement. “Maybe to you. For me, this is my life and soul.”

Looking at postcards convinced Parr that he should try working in colour himself. “Much of the language I have adopted has come from the commercial photography world,” he says.

“It’s bright, it’s colourful. It’s entertainment. Having changed, I never went back.”

His first substantial series of colour photographs, The Last Resort, made his name. (Ten pictures from the series will be included in Parr’s Hepworth Wakefield retrospective.) These photographs, which depict working-class holidaymakers relaxing in the shabby seaside resort of New Brighton, a few miles along the coast from Wallasey, remain as startling today as ever.

A naked boy scampers in front of a patch of sea clogged with garbage. A sunbather lies alarmingly close to the caterpillar tracks of a digger on a concrete ramp. Pasty holidaymakers jostle for hotdogs. A baby under a pink sunshade wails unheeded by its mother.

Here, it seems, is a vision of dereliction and despair – an indictment, presumably, of Britain under Thatcher.

The photographs did not attract much attention when they were initially exhibited in Liverpool. But when they were shown at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1986, they were, says Parr, “quite controversial”.

What did people say? “You know, that they were exploitative, blah, blah, blah. Taking the p--- out of the working classes.” Did he feel misunderstood? “To a certain extent, yes. But it did me no harm, because it made people look at the work. I don’t care what people write or say. I’m pretty laid back.”

Although the reaction to The Last Resort didn’t hinder him, the charge of exploitation has lingered. The picture editor Colin Jacobson once called Parr “a gratuitously cruel social critic who has made a large amount of money by sneering at the foibles and pretensions of other people”.

Most photographs we digest are a lie. My job is to question that.

Martin Parr

Then there was the hoo-ha when Parr applied to become a member of the leading photographic cooperative Magnum, of which he is now president. Welsh photojournalist Philip Jones Griffiths wrote a letter to the members of Magnum in which, Parr recalls, “he said I was a 'fascist’ photographer. I was somewhat amused, but obviously felt let down.” The target of Parr’s “mischief” is not always clear. One typical picture shows a light switch surrounded by ornamental plastic like a fancy picture frame. It appears to invite mockery of whoever was pretentious enough to decorate their house in such a kitsch fashion.

Yet, says Parr, “if there is snobbery to be found there, it must be in the viewer, and all I’ve done is echo that. Are you saying everything should be anaesthetised?”

Alternatively, consider Parr’s close-up pictures of food, which he shoots using a macro lens and a ring flash, presenting the subject in a bright, even unflattering light, like a medical specimen. At first glance, the cheap junk food in his images appears disgusting.

New Brighton. From 'The Last Resort'. 1983-85.Credit:
Martin Parr/Magnum Photos

“That’s what you say,” he says quickly, before adopting the exasperated tone of a teacher explaining something for the umpteenth time. “Food is a big lie. If you look at a package in a supermarket and then you look inside at the food you are buying, the two have very little relationship, right? It’s a fundamental lie. So my pictures are of real food, as we find it, and they are not all disgusting. You must understand that when I explain it to you, yes?”

Parr’s riposte to the “fundamental lie” of food photography is at the core of his identity as an artist. “Most of the photographs we digest are telling us a lie. My job is to question that.”

He does this, he says, by enacting his primary role as a “documentary” photographer: to record the world as he encounters it, with intelligence, openness, and honesty. “You show things as you find them.”

Does he prefer to photograph any social group in particular? “I find them all interesting,” he says with surprising aggression, as though sensing a trap. “So, no is the answer to that.”

What about the wit and irony of his pictures: how important are these elements to him?

“Documentary is subjective and I try to make it as engaging as possible. I’m in the entertainment business.” He pauses. “There are serious undertones to what I do – my pictures are ambiguous, as I think good photography should be – but it isn’t my job to tell people what they are.”

He has been taking pictures for more than 40 years. Does he plan to retire? “I don’t think so,” he says. “I do other things that complement my work as a photographer: I edit, I am the president of Magnum, I curate.”

As well as running the Martin Parr Foundation, which advances education in the art of photography, he is curating Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers, an exhibition that will open at the Barbican in March.By now, I suggest, he must have finessed the formula for taking a quintessential “Parr” photograph. “You are after iconic moments,” he concedes, “but they are very difficult to produce. Most of the pictures I take are not very good. For the rhubarb commission, I took three or four thousand – and ended up with 40. If I knew how to take a great photo, I would stop.

“My job is to record things with integrity, and I can always do that,” he says. “Whether I take a 'great’ photo is down to luck.”

The Rhubarb Triangle & Other Stories is at the Hepworth Wakefield from February 4. Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers is at the Barbican Art Gallery, London from March 16.